1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to databases and the electronic storage and retrieval of information related to samples and tests. In particular, the invention relates to the technology for efficient data delivery, collaborative publishing and sharing of data related to samples and tests while safeguarding the interests of the stakeholders of the data.
2. Description of Related Art
Many materials databases exist today to serve as a repository of particular kinds of properties, analogous to the way the Internet stores a wide variety of information. Because of the enormous variety of material data, the emphasis to date, of such databases has been to collect all available properties of the kind that they have been designed to accommodate and then serve it to the client base for the purpose of comparison between materials. Products such as Matweb, CAMPUS and IDES are examples of such technologies. The primary advantage of this approach is that there is a large repository to search from, aiding in material selection from a wide palette of possible choices. Unfortunately, a proliferation of such specialized databases exists, often with conflicting property data and having no means to perform streamlined searches to find appropriate and valid data. Further, such extended collections may still not contain the specific properties of interest to the user.
Many companies then try to develop their own means to collect only the properties they need on the materials that they have an interest in. However, this calls for internal databases which are costly to design and cumbersome to maintain. With properties that reflect the reality of the product behavior, the need for privacy is heightened so that such databases are usually private. A typical user now has to choose between an internal database and the multitude of external databases for his data. Maintaining such multiple data sources in the enterprise, besides adding cost and inefficiencies, results in the risk of inconsistent material property data usage in the product life cycle. Consequently, within the same product development group, different data may be used, compromising the robustness of the design. To further complicate the collaborative environment, material data is stored in proprietary formats understood only by the program responsible for rendering the data visually.
A non proprietary format in existence today is MATML (a derivative of the XML language, developed by the W3C Consortium). MATML is developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and is touted as a standard with respect to representation of material data. However MATML does not satisfy all requirements for presenting the material data with regards to the context from which it originated.
There exist systems which are able to store and retrieve MATML documents. One example of such is CENTOR (Centor Software Corp., Irvine, Calif.) which is a system specialized purely to store XML documents efficiently. CENTOR is a generalized solution for storage and retrieval of XML documents which does not take into account the specialized requirements of collaborative publishing and sharing of material data.
For the greatest efficiency, data would need to be catalogued and stored effectively, with controlled access, for use by interested (and permitted) parties across different enterprises and geographic locations.